XNA Game Studio 4.0 is a programming environment that allows you to use Visual Studio 2010 to create games for Windows Phone, the Xbox 360 console, and Windows-based computers. XNA Game Studio 4.0 includes the XNA Framework 4.0, which is a set of managed libraries designed for game development based on Microsoft .NET Framework 4.

To run XNA Framework games on a computer running a Windows operating system, you need a graphics card that supports, at minimum, Shader Model 1.1 and DirectX 9.0c. We recommend using a graphics card that supports Shader Model 2.0, which is required by some samples and starter kits. To execute and debug XNA Framework games for Windows Phone with the Windows Phone emulator, you need a graphics card that supports, at minimum, DirectX 10, with a supporting WDDM 1.1 driver. To develop XNA Framework games for Xbox 360, you need a hard disk installed on your Xbox 360 console. Other hardware requirements for XNA Game Studio 4.0 are identical to those for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010.